Chương 294: 124.Scorching Cadmium Planet 1

Half an hour later, when we assembled in the lower staging bay, the air already felt like it had been pre-heated in honor of that godforsaken planet. Technically, the bay's climate control was probably still within normal range. It wasn't hot enough to cook anyone, and it definitely wasn't doing what the ice-world run had done — freezing the air in your sinuses.

But with the main display filling an entire wall with the Scorching Cadmium Planet's thermal surface imaging, and the supply crew stacking crates of high-heat filter cartridges, thermal shielding mesh modules, and auxiliary cooling packs in front of us one at a time, every breath carried a faint undertone of you'll be in the oven soon enough. The Yukikaze had gotten very good at manufacturing that kind of undertone lately. And usually, she was just as good at turning it into fact. The staging bay wasn't crowded.

The actual descent team was small: me, Maki, Jess, Dwight "D" Barkley, and a handful of soldiers assigned to haul the collection crates and recovery frames. Ash wasn't coming down. Neither was Aida. That surprised me at first. Then it made sense. This wasn't a "high-efficiency mining specialist team" operation. It was more of a probe — land alive, grab what can be grabbed, then decide whether this hellball is worth digging deeper into.

Which meant our team's actual function sat somewhere between vanguard and manual labor, with a side assignment of finding out whether we'd get charred into commemorative keepsakes. Not exactly a glamorous job description. Mechanical arms on both sides of the bay lowered a set of modified high-heat protective suits. Compared to the low-gravity suits from the ice-field run, these were thicker, harder, and considerably less forgiving.

Matte, heat-resistant scale plating on the exterior; joints backed with low-reflectivity metal fiber; twin heat-exchange channels running down the chest and spine; emergency cooling cartridges riding on the hips. The overall aesthetic was very Yukikaze: not pretty, not romantic, not offering a single moment you'd want to commemorate with a photo. But it did look like something that might buy you a few extra minutes to finish a sentence inside a 320-degree storm. Jess let out a low whistle.

"These things have real character." She slapped the chestplate of her descending suit.

"Wearing this feels like gearing up to pick a fight with the sun."

"You go pick the fight," I said, taking my own gear.

"I'll stand back and hold a moment of silence."

"Harsh."

"I have very strict principles about high-temperature environments." She laughed. Still that slightly-off-color laugh of hers. Annoying. Also familiar. D stood off to one side, already running through his kit without a word. His movements were clean and efficient — like a piece of machinery that had recently had its operating manual reinstalled. Fasteners first, then seals, then the tool anchor points at his waist, checking his holster and thermal cutter with the same unhurried rhythm as breathing.

Ever since Victor had dragged him off for "training," he'd drifted further into the category of licensed blunt instrument. Not louder. Quieter. Quiet enough that instinct told you: if this man actually moved, it wouldn't be noisy. The soldiers nearby were sorting the collapsible racks and recovery crates. No names here. Didn't need them. Not right now.

There was a strange safety in that anonymity — as long as you didn't attach too much story to anyone's face, you could almost pretend this was routine work, not a mission sending a group of reasonably young people into a fire-spitting metal hell to pick up rocks. I'd gotten the lower half of the suit on and was wrestling with the thermal mesh interface on the chest when Maki walked over.

"Don't force the clasps," she said. My hands stopped.

"I'm not forcing them." She glanced down at the row of half-engaged locks along my ribs. Her voice was flat to the point of cruelty.

"Third segment's misaligned." I looked down.... It was. I pulled my hands back, aiming for nonchalance.

"Not my fault. Whoever designed these clasps clearly harbors a personal grudge against the human body."

"It's just honestly reflecting how tired you still are." She reached over, naturally, unclipped the segment, aligned it, and pressed it home. A soft click. It still sent something tight up my spine. I don't like admitting it, but lately, whenever Maki stands this close, my brain has a hard time staying professional.

Which is a real problem, especially in a bay full of people and lights, everyone gearing up to descend into a heat-hell, while I burn a portion of my bandwidth on the completely tactically useless question of do I look like a suspicious idiot when she's standing this close. Once my front panel was secure, she pulled up my wrist terminal and started adjusting the thermal parameters.

"Your thermal mesh threshold's set too conservative," she said.

"Isn't conservative good?"

"Too conservative burns through your buffer during the normal range." Her fingers moved quickly across the display, nudging a few curves upward.

"The point isn't whether you're afraid of the heat. It's whether you still have margin left when it's actually time to be afraid." Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. That was exactly the kind of thing she'd say. Sounded like she was adjusting the gear. Felt like she was adjusting the person wearing it. I stood there and let her work, looking down at the crown of her head, the line of her profile.

The overhead lights ran white, pressing that already-unapproachable coolness of hers into sharper relief. Her hands stayed steady the whole time. Precise. Precise enough that I kept thinking, in parallel: does this woman have any idea how unfriendly it is to somebody's heart, standing this close while she tunes their suit parameters? I must not have slept enough. My nerve and my judgment had both loosened by half. Because I actually spoke, low.

"Maki."

"Mm."

"That data field you closed off during the briefing—" Her hands didn't stop. She didn't look up right away either. She just locked in the last thermal-trigger value, pushed my wrist terminal back to standby, and answered in a tone so level it sounded pre-loaded.

"We'll talk when we're back." Five words. No explanation. No not a good time. No don't ask right now. None of the softer, more roundabout versions I'd half-expected. Which was exactly why I had nothing left to say. Because I knew this wasn't a brush-off. She really did have something to keep. And she really did intend to tell me — on the condition that we made it back. Whatever I'd been about to press her on died cleanly against those five words, leaving only one fairly useless reply.

"... Okay." Maki finally looked up. Brief. Barely long enough to confirm I'd heard her. But I read something very Maki in it — she wasn't refusing to let me know. She was just pushing knowing further back in the queue. Ahead of it: the mission, the descent, the heat storm, the survival odds. The Kushima wire, whatever she'd hidden — those would have to wait their turn. Infuriatingly rational. Also correct. Jess's voice floated in from behind.

"Am I interrupting something?" I nearly jumped out of my own skin. She was already fully suited, helmet tucked under one arm, wearing the expression of someone who knew exactly what she was asking. The most dangerous thing about Jess is that you can never tell whether she genuinely just walked over, or timed her arrival for the single most inconvenient moment available. I cleared my throat.

"If you know you're interrupting, you should learn to leave quietly."

"Wow, harsh." She blinked.

"I was just going to mention your left cooling pack isn't clipped." I looked down.... It wasn't. Great. Today's humiliation quota was clearly nowhere near tapped out. Maki didn't laugh. She just crouched, snapped the cooling pack into the leg mount, and stood back up.

"Done," she said. Jess looked between us, the corner of her mouth deepening.

"You two work well together."

"Thanks," I said, deadpan.

"Go check whether your own filter's in backwards."

"Checked it three times."

"Check a fourth." She threw up her hands, laughing, and went to bother D instead. Watching her go, that unlovely, complicated feeling flared up again. Honestly, my attitude toward Jess had nearly upgraded from this person is annoying to this person is annoying, and I now know exactly when she's doing it on purpose and when she isn't. That level of understanding was dangerous on its own. Add Maki standing right next to me, and lately my brain felt like fate had been running some deeply unhealthy experiment on it.

An NCO's voice cut across the bay.

"Final checks! Helmet seals, filters, thermal mesh, emergency water bladder, recovery frames!" The soldiers called back in sequence. D finished his own kit, pressed the last clasp home, and looked over.

"Ready?"

"Physically, more or less," I said.

"Mentally?"

"That's not standard issue on the Yukikaze, is it." D looked at me for two seconds, then answered, flat: "Fair point." I was beginning to wonder if Victor's training had included a sharpening session for his sense of humor too. The status lights over the hatch shifted from white to amber — descent pod pre-launch. Soldiers hauled the folding racks and empty crates into the small lander, metal corners hitting the deck in short, dry, sharp knocks.

Nothing like the ice-field prep, which had carried a crisp, glassy quality — frost and clean edges. This sounded like everything had already been through a furnace once. Even the clang of metal carried a faint burnt undertone. I locked my helmet. A pale blue ring lit up inside my visor. Thermal mesh: online. Filter cycle: nominal. Auxiliary cooling: standby. Body temperature: normal. Heart rate: elevated. I decided not to see that last line. We boarded in sequence.

The lander's interior wasn't built for comfort — benches along the walls facing each other, center cleared for the frame anchors. The soldiers near the aft barely spoke, the only sounds the knock of gear and the click of restraints. D sat diagonally across from me, a fixed block of black armor. Jess dropped in beside me, helmet in her lap, looking far too relaxed — like we weren't descending toward a planet that could parboil us, but heading out on a day trip that happened to border hell.

Maki took the seat on my other side. Terrible seating arrangement. Also lethal. It put me, in a space just large enough to feel the presence of both, squarely between her and Jess. The universe really does have a lot of free time — enough to use seat assignments to mock someone's mental state. The hatch sealed. After the lock engaged, the Yukikaze's familiar low hum gave way to something more direct — thruster prep, separation, attitude correction.

The lander felt like it had been plucked from the mothership's belly by invisible hands, dropped briefly, and started down. I looked out the side viewport on reflex. At first, only deep space. Pure black, the kind that felt like nothing had started yet. The Yukikaze's hull edge flared past — gray-black, lean, scarred with patched plating and unreasonable persistence. Then the black got eaten by something else. Dark red, first. Not the pretty red of a sunrise, not the artificial red of a warning light.

A heavy red seeping out of the planet itself — the color iron turns at a very particular temperature. Then the scorched surface outline rose up, like some massive corpse rolling over under ash. Further down, the terrain's texture resolved — the crisscrossing channels of cooled lava like black scars split open across the ground, exposed ore veins throwing back an ominous metallic glare between them, as if the whole planet weren't a crust at all but a still-breathing ore bed. Metallic dust drifted in the atmosphere.

From this altitude it didn't look like dust — more like dark fire scattered into the sky, fine and dense, catching the star's light in something between beautiful and malicious. The whole world distorted; heat haze worked at the horizon until the red-black surface looked like it would never settle. I stared out the window and, for a moment, forgot to be sarcastic. Because the pressure of it was genuinely unreasonable. Nothing like the ice world.

That had been silent, pale — the kind of place that made you feel like you'd stepped into a graveyard too cold to hold any feeling. This planet was the opposite. Alive. Restless. Hot enough that every cubic meter of air felt personally offended. It wasn't quiet. It just couldn't be bothered hiding how badly it wanted to bake everything dry. I finally spoke.

"... Ugly." Jess laughed beside me.

"I thought you'd say spectacular.""'Spectacular' is for tourist brochures." I watched a lava channel split the ground like a burst artery.

"This is the universe demonstrating exactly how much it hates us." Maki didn't laugh. She was looking out too, the dark red catching faintly in her visor, painting a thin wash of the planet's color across her. After two seconds, flat: "At least the veins are obvious." Reasonable. Very Maki. Everyone else is looking at an apocalypse. She's already checking where to dig.

I'd been about to say something back when the lander shuddered lightly — attitude thrusters correcting our angle — and the dark red surface surged wider across the window all at once. It didn't feel like approaching a planet. It felt like sliding into a furnace. The black of deep space had fully retreated. Only the end-of-the-world red and char remained, eating the viewport inch by inch.